Ed, one of my ski partners, sits on a stool next to the potbelly stove, crinkling up pages from the Idaho Mountain Express to start a fire. With each page he pauses: skimming the headlines before slowly forming the paper into a ball and placing it in the stove. When he reaches the horoscope section he clears his throat to get our attention.
“Chase,” he says, “you won’t learn anything if you do it right the first time.” I’m sitting across the yurt from Ed, a mug of tea nestled in my hands. I take a sip, lower my eyelids, and peer at him through the steam rising out of the mug—exaggerating, to his amusement, that I’m thinking deeply about the advice.
“Brian,” Ed continues, beginning to giggle. “Don’t argue with your adversary even if he, or she,” he accentuates the she and shoots a sideways glance at me, “is wrong.”
“Very interesting,” I say, refocusing my glare on Brian, who is lounging on the bench next to me, with his feet resting on a chair and his fingers intertwined on his belly: a confident half-smile on his face. We learned at the beginning of the ski season that our styles occasionally don’t jive: we are both stubborn, competitive, and hate being wrong. He is a more aggressive skier; I am a far superior arguer.
After the horoscope reading, the three of us agree on a tour for the next day, to an area called Little Basin. To get there, we will ski down from the hut, and then gain a densely treed, 2,000-foot ridge that overlooks the basin. But from the ridge, we struggle to agree on a route into the basin, specifically a route to the lines—on the far side of the basin—that we want to ski. Exhausted from trying to communicate with each other, we decide to avoid conflict for the rest of the evening: we will figure the rest of the route out from the ridge in the morning.
At 7:00 a.m. I fumble around for my glasses, climb down from my bunk, and put water on to boil. Once the hot water is ready we sit on our bunks, feet still in our sleeping bags, and drink coffee—mostly in silence. Ed periodically breaks the silence to tell a story about his time in the Peace Corps, or about the winters he lived out of a school bus. I laugh and nod and ask occasional questions; Brian stares off into space and occasionally grunts. After coffee we eat breakfast, pack our bags for the day, and by 9:00 a.m. are standing in the bright sunlight outside the yurt—blinking, twitching, and finally starting to wake up.
The morning is already warm, rising above freezing, but the slope below the yurt is still partially frozen, making for awkward skiing through heavy, breakable crust. Brian is the only one who doesn’t face-plant on his way down. At the bottom of the run, while putting on our skins, I can tell the uncomfortable descent put a damper on the group’s mood. I take it as an opportunity to step in as the leader for the climb to the ridgeline.
“I want to try something new,” I say, looking at the jungle of Douglas Firs scouring the ridge in front of us. The day before we put a skin track up through dense trees to the climber’s right of a prominent drainage. The snow pack was shallow, and numerous down trees made navigation difficult. “I know the left of the drainage looks a little steeper, but I think we can follow this ramp,” I gesture with my ski pole, “to that rib with sparse trees, and then up to that notch.”
The guys follow my ski pole, and nod slowly in acknowledgement of the line I describe.
“Can we try it? It looks more complicated, but I think it will be better,” I say. “Plus, my horoscope said I should make mistakes.” The guys laugh at my little joke. I believe the stars laughed also.
“Go for it,” Ed says.
Brian nods.
I charge ahead, and the first 1,000 feet of the route is ideal. The trees prove to be more open than our previous route, and gaining the ramp is easy. At about 1,000 feet, Ed compliments my line. Brian is falling behind, which is rare, and I’m worried something is wrong.
“I’m fine,” he says. “This is good.”
I’m feeling dehydrated: a long tour yesterday, coupled with coffee this morning, and zero water since then. But I don’t want to stop and allow either of the guys to take over the trail breaking: I’m excited about this route, and I want to see it through to the top. I continue to charge, and both Ed and Brian fall behind.
At the top of the ramp is a large, open snowfield. I decide the rib to climber’s left is the rib I looked at from below, although I’m having trouble remembering the open snowfield. It is the most obvious line: any other navigation choice would involve crossing underneath the snowfield, which is bad avalanche protocol—plus, the rib on the other side looks steeper than the one I’m choosing to climb.
No one says anything for another 500 feet. On one of the switchbacks, cutting back toward the open snowfield, Ed starts to look around. He pauses in the skin track and yells up to me, two switchbacks ahead of him.
“Hey Chase,” he says. “Where are we going?”
“To the top of the ridge.” My response is followed by silence. “Do you think I’m off route?”
“I haven’t been paying attention,” Ed says. “But I don’t remember wanting to be next to this open slope.”
“Me either,” I say. “But I didn’t want to cross the slope. What do you think we should do?” The sun is directly above us, and the snow is so bright I squint as I look down the slope at the guys. It’s warm: Ed’s blonde hair is sweaty and matted to his forehead. I’m wearing only a tank top on my upper body, and still sweating, even while standing still.
“I don’t know. I think the ridge above us is a knife-edge. I could be wrong,” Ed continues moving up the skin track. I remain motionless.
“Do you think we can cut along the top of the ridge through those trees?” I ask, pointing directly above us, to a thin band of Sub Alpine Firs.
“Maybe,” Ed says, “but that might be a false summit. I think there’s steep rock above them.”
“Brian, what do you think?” I ask.
He pauses, shrugs, and continues moving behind Ed. I continue putting switchbacks up the rib.
500 feet later I’m almost to the top of the snowline, parallel with the thin band of trees. Sure enough, the ridge continues above me: in the form of steep, loose rock, stacked about 20 feet high. I take my skis off to explore further, and kick steps along the base of the rock band. Then I climb up onto the highest piece of rock and look around.
Ed yells up to me, “how’s it look?”
“Shit,” is my only response. In front of me, the ridge is too narrow to comfortably scramble along. To my left I look down at a cliff band, with several steep snow-filled chutes about 200 feet below. To my right: a band of steep, wind hammered snow with a few bent and gnarled trees. I slowly climb back down the rock, and then kick steps back toward the guys. My skis are halfway between the boys and me, and when I reach them I put my ski poles around my wrists, and hold one telemark binding in each hand.
The closer I get to the boys, the softer the snow becomes: I pick up my pace. I plant my right foot firmly into the snow, it sinks in farther than I expect, and I slip. My right foot catches on something below it: I am dangling, face down the slope, gripping my skis in each hand. I disguise my panic and look over at the guys. They stifle their laughter—scared I am about to start sliding uncontrollably.
“Ed,” I say, “will you come take my skis from me.”
Once my hands are free, I slowly wiggle parallel with the slope and stand up. I look at the hole by my right foot: I slipped on a buried tree root, and somehow managed to stick my toe underneath, which saved me from sliding down the slope.
“You can laugh,” I say to the guys. “The least I can do is put on a good show today.”
I’m worried they’re upset with my route finding, but they smile.
“What do you want to do?” I ask. “We can’t traverse this ridge.”
“Eat lunch,” Ed says.
“Then we’ll ski the shot I really wanted to ski today,” Brian says. I look at him confused.
“The steep northwest chute he’s been eyeing from the hut,” Ed explains.
“It starts right here?” I ask, pointing north down the ridge.
We eat lunch mostly in silence. I drink water and look at the map.
“It would have been hell getting into Little Basin from the top of this ridge, even if we ended up where we wanted too,” I say. “We’d have to ski the south shots that drop into it, and those were mostly sagebrush when we looked at them yesterday. And then climb back out, just to ski one decent shot.”
“I know,” Brian says.
“It’s already one o’clock,” I add.
We give Brian first tracks down his powder-filled chute, and it’s great skiing: light powder, so deep that we all receive shots of snow to the face. We whoop, and yell, and laugh as we ski. Powder is the best solution for any mistake.
At the bottom, I ask Brian if he knew I was off course on the climb up. He nods. “Why didn’t you say anything,” I ask.
“Because Ed said not to argue with you,” he says, looking up at the beautiful line we just skied: three sets of tracks spooned tightly in a narrow chute, disappearing momentarily into the trees, and then emerging to lookers left through a pinch between boulders and trees—into an open field of powder. On the bottom half of the run Brian’s tracts are tight and Z shaped, mine are almost anal retentive in their roundness, and Ed’s are large and sweeping, traversing a majority of the open white.
“And because we were supposed to ski this line,” I add.
Essay written March 2009
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